FFmpeg is one of those tools I need to use so infrequently that he exact syntax never seems to stick. I've resorted to using an LLM to give me the command line I need. The only other tool that I ever had trouble with was 1990s-era MegaCLI from LSI Logic, also something I barely used from one year to the next (but one where you really need to get it right under pressure).
I've been using FFMPEG for 15+ years, and still can't remember almost any commands. LLMs have been amazing for using FFMPEG though. ChatGPT and Claude do wonders with "give me an ffmpeg command that will remux a video into mkv, include subtitle.srt in the file, and I only want it between 0:00:05 and 0:01:00." It produced this in case you were wondering: `ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -i subtitle.srt -ss 00:00:05 -to 00:01:00 -map 0 -map 1 -c copy -c:s mov_text output.mkv`
I wonder how small of an LLM you could develop if you only wanted to target creating ffmpeg commands. Perhaps it could be small enough to be hosted on a static webpage where it is run locally?
Perhaps small enough to include in ffmpeg itself so you can just write commands `ffmpeg do this thing I want`.
Now I say this, it seems like there should already be a shell that is also an LLM where you can mix bits of commands you vaguely remember and natural language a bit like Del Boy speaking French...
That would be an amazingly useful feature of ffmpeg, and considering how large its dependencies are (390MB of packages for `apt install ffmpeg` on a fresh Raspberry Pi OS install), it would be reasonable to have an optional model package.
I was kind of curious about that one too. It is encoding the SRT into the MP4/MOV subtitle format. I use it all the time when muxing subs into MP4s, but I haven't seen what happens with an MKV like that. It is very well supported in MP4s.
Yeah I commented the other day, tongue firmly in cheek, that it's probably worth burning down all the rainforests just so LLMs can tell me the right ffmpeg flags to do what I want.
